President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had warned of a possible overnight attack on the Ukrainian capital and said he was cutting short his visit to Dublin for the start of Ireland's six-month term in the rotating presidency of the EU.
Tymur Tkachenko, head of the capital's military administration, said eight people had been killed, with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks. He did not elaborate.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, writing on Telegram, said separately 34 more were injured, adding that among the damages, the first to sixth floors of an apartment building collapsed after a direct hit.
Reuters video footage showed emergency services working through the rubble of that used to be a nine-storey building as the sun started to rise over Kyiv.
In an earlier post, Klitschko said the injured included paramedics and drivers at an ambulance station, and that some people were still trapped inside damaged residential buildings.
Pictures posted online showed a fire burning out of control at the top of a building on the central Shevchenko Boulevard, while elsewhere in the city, windows blew out and cars were destroyed. Multiple explosions were heard in Kyiv, a Reuters witness said.
Carrying children, belongings, tents and pets, people crowded into underground stations, as air raid alerts were issued for most of Ukraine's territory in Russia's worst attack on the country since mid-June.
"Another horrific night for the residents of the city, who were forced to spend it in shelters," Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine's ambassador to the United States, said in a post on X.
Neighbouring Poland, a NATO and European Union member, briefly scrambled fighter jets on Thursday as a preventive measure before calling those back and saying no airspace violation was recorded.
Zelenskiy has proposed talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the more than four-year-old war that the Kremlin leader has rejected.
Ukraine has recently intensified strikes deeper into the Russian territory, triggering a widespread fuel crisis in the world's third-biggest oil producer and forcing it to import gasoline from as far away as India.
Governor Alexander Drozdenkoof Russia's northwestern Leningrad region, Putin's home and where large export and oil refining facilities are located, said on Telegram that Russian forces brought down seven drones on Thursday.
Earlier, Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces struck Russia's major Ufa oil refinery for the second time in a week.
The Ufa refinery is one of Russia's largest producers of lubricants and is located more than 1000km from Ukraine, Zelenskiy said on social media.
Ukraine also struck a plant producing missile components in Russia's Penza region southeast of Moscow, some 500km from Ukraine, Zelenskiy said.
Russian officials did not confirm the strikes, which could not be independently verified.
Penza regional Governor Oleg Melnichenko said Ukrainian drones struck two industrial plants in the city of Penza, injuring two people at one of them.
with Reuters
